Where the Reformers Aren't All That Nice

Who Will Remember by C.S. Harris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Such a great series. I knew before I opened it I'd love this book--they've all been good, and only getting better.

Sebastian St. Cyr is a great MC, and the only character I like as much as him is his wife, Hero, who I'd really like to see played by Anna Maxwell or someone as nearly like her as possible. She's tough and smart and unafraid, but also kind and energetic and hopeful. They make a great pair in every sense, including crime-solving.

The setting, as always, is well used here. 1815, the year without a summer, is where we find Sebastian trying to solve the strange murder of a nobleman left hanging upside down in the ruins of an old church. It's raining all the time, as it did that summer, almost certainly because of a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world. Important scenes also take place in another ruins, an old palatial residence along the Thames. This is the time period when soldiers are returning from the war with Napoleon, many of them wounded, and trying to find a place in a society--a job, a family, a way to survive. (Hero is interviewing some of these veterans to write a story about the difficulties fighting men faced in that era.) The author is very good at using genuine details like these to establish a real sense of place and time to give the story an added level of gritty realness.

It's a great mystery with lots of clues and misdirection, but it's also an action story. There is genuine danger for Sebastian and Hero and a few others, and they have to act and react to survive; it's not cerebral effort alone, and I like that mix. A few of the novels in this long-running series lean pretty far toward the side of high stakes and high anxiety, giving the reader a lot of tension, and all of them (IMO) tend toward that side of the scale, more tense than cozy, but I'd put this one and quite a few of them pretty nearly in the center of that scale. (Not sure I'm making my thoughts clear. Hope so.)

These books are always fun. I read a lot of books (a little at a time) all at once, and this one stayed at the top of the the pile every day. Or I'd read a chunk of a book I'm only kinda enjoying with the promise that I'd read this one next. Which is to say--this is good fun.

Recommended.

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